Pseudo-label-based semi-supervised learning (SSL) has achieved great success on raw data utilization. However, its training procedure suffers from confirmation bias due to the noise contained in self-generated artificial labels. Moreover, the model's judgment becomes noisier in real-world applications with extensive out-of-distribution data. To address this issue, we propose a general method named Class-aware Contrastive Semi-Supervised Learning (CCSSL), which is a drop-in helper to improve the pseudo-label quality and enhance the model's robustness in the real-world setting. Rather than treating real-world data as a union set, our method separately handles reliable in-distribution data with class-wise clustering for blending into downstream tasks and noisy out-of-distribution data with image-wise contrastive for better generalization. Furthermore, by applying target re-weighting, we successfully emphasize clean label learning and simultaneously reduce noisy label learning. Despite its simplicity, our proposed CCSSL has significant performance improvements over the state-of-the-art SSL methods on the standard datasets CIFAR100 and STL10. On the real-world dataset Semi-iNat 2021, we improve FixMatch by 9.80% and CoMatch by 3.18%. Code is available //github.com/TencentYoutuResearch/Classification-SemiCLS.
Deep neural networks achieve remarkable performances on a wide range of tasks with the aid of large-scale labeled datasets. Yet these datasets are time-consuming and labor-exhaustive to obtain on realistic tasks. To mitigate the requirement for labeled data, self-training is widely used in semi-supervised learning by iteratively assigning pseudo labels to unlabeled samples. Despite its popularity, self-training is well-believed to be unreliable and often leads to training instability. Our experimental studies further reveal that the bias in semi-supervised learning arises from both the problem itself and the inappropriate training with potentially incorrect pseudo labels, which accumulates the error in the iterative self-training process. To reduce the above bias, we propose Debiased Self-Training (DST). First, the generation and utilization of pseudo labels are decoupled by two parameter-independent classifier heads to avoid direct error accumulation. Second, we estimate the worst case of self-training bias, where the pseudo labeling function is accurate on labeled samples, yet makes as many mistakes as possible on unlabeled samples. We then adversarially optimize the representations to improve the quality of pseudo labels by avoiding the worst case. Extensive experiments justify that DST achieves an average improvement of 6.3% against state-of-the-art methods on standard semi-supervised learning benchmark datasets and 18.9%$ against FixMatch on 13 diverse tasks. Furthermore, DST can be seamlessly adapted to other self-training methods and help stabilize their training and balance performance across classes in both cases of training from scratch and finetuning from pre-trained models.
Conventional event detection models under supervised learning settings suffer from the inability of transfer to newly-emerged event types owing to lack of sufficient annotations. A commonly-adapted solution is to follow a identify-then-classify manner, which first identifies the triggers and then converts the classification task via a few-shot learning paradigm. However, these methods still fall far short of expectations due to: (i) insufficient learning of discriminative representations in low-resource scenarios, and (ii) trigger misidentification caused by the overlap of the learned representations of triggers and non-triggers. To address the problems, in this paper, we propose a novel Hybrid Contrastive Learning method with a Task-Adaptive Threshold (abbreviated as HCLTAT), which enables discriminative representation learning with a two-view contrastive loss (support-support and prototype-query), and devises a easily-adapted threshold to alleviate misidentification of triggers. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset FewEvent demonstrate the superiority of our method to achieve better results compared to the state-of-the-arts. All the code and data of this paper will be available for online public access.
Deep Neural Network (DNN) based point cloud semantic segmentation has presented significant achievements on large-scale labeled aerial laser point cloud datasets. However, annotating such large-scaled point clouds is time-consuming. Due to density variations and spatial heterogeneity of the Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) point clouds, DNNs lack generalization capability and thus lead to unpromising semantic segmentation, as the DNN trained in one region underperform when directly utilized in other regions. However, Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) is a promising way to solve this problem by pre-training a DNN model utilizing unlabeled samples followed by a fine-tuned downstream task involving very limited labels. Hence, this work proposes a hard-negative sample aware self-supervised contrastive learning method to pre-train the model for semantic segmentation. The traditional contrastive learning for point clouds selects the hardest negative samples by solely relying on the distance between the embedded features derived from the learning process, potentially evolving some negative samples from the same classes to reduce the contrastive learning effectiveness. Therefore, we design an AbsPAN (Absolute Positive And Negative samples) strategy based on k-means clustering to filter the possible false-negative samples. Experiments on two typical ALS benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is more appealing than supervised training schemes without pre-training. Especially when the labels are severely inadequate (10% of the ISPRS training set), the results obtained by the proposed HAVANA method still exceed 94% of the supervised paradigm performance with full training set.
Recently, unsupervised adversarial training (AT) has been extensively studied to attain robustness with the models trained upon unlabeled data. To this end, previous studies have applied existing supervised adversarial training techniques to self-supervised learning (SSL) frameworks. However, all have resorted to untargeted adversarial learning as obtaining targeted adversarial examples is unclear in the SSL setting lacking of label information. In this paper, we propose a novel targeted adversarial training method for the SSL frameworks. Specifically, we propose a target selection algorithm for the adversarial SSL frameworks; it is designed to select the most confusing sample for each given instance based on similarity and entropy, and perturb the given instance toward the selected target sample. Our method significantly enhances the robustness of an SSL model without requiring large batches of images or additional models, unlike existing works aimed at achieving the same goal. Moreover, our method is readily applicable to general SSL frameworks that only uses positive pairs. We validate our method on benchmark datasets, on which it obtains superior robust accuracies, outperforming existing unsupervised adversarial training methods.
Capturing emotions within a conversation plays an essential role in modern dialogue systems. However, the weak correlation between emotions and semantics brings many challenges to emotion recognition in conversation (ERC). Even semantically similar utterances, the emotion may vary drastically depending on contexts or speakers. In this paper, we propose a Supervised Prototypical Contrastive Learning (SPCL) loss for the ERC task. Leveraging the Prototypical Network, the SPCL targets at solving the imbalanced classification problem through contrastive learning and does not require a large batch size. Meanwhile, we design a difficulty measure function based on the distance between classes and introduce curriculum learning to alleviate the impact of extreme samples. We achieve state-of-the-art results on three widely used benchmarks. Further, we conduct analytical experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed SPCL and curriculum learning strategy. We release the code at //github.com/caskcsg/SPCL.
Standard contrastive learning approaches usually require a large number of negatives for effective unsupervised learning and often exhibit slow convergence. We suspect this behavior is due to the suboptimal selection of negatives used for offering contrast to the positives. We counter this difficulty by taking inspiration from support vector machines (SVMs) to present max-margin contrastive learning (MMCL). Our approach selects negatives as the sparse support vectors obtained via a quadratic optimization problem, and contrastiveness is enforced by maximizing the decision margin. As SVM optimization can be computationally demanding, especially in an end-to-end setting, we present simplifications that alleviate the computational burden. We validate our approach on standard vision benchmark datasets, demonstrating better performance in unsupervised representation learning over state-of-the-art, while having better empirical convergence properties.
To date, most existing self-supervised learning methods are designed and optimized for image classification. These pre-trained models can be sub-optimal for dense prediction tasks due to the discrepancy between image-level prediction and pixel-level prediction. To fill this gap, we aim to design an effective, dense self-supervised learning method that directly works at the level of pixels (or local features) by taking into account the correspondence between local features. We present dense contrastive learning, which implements self-supervised learning by optimizing a pairwise contrastive (dis)similarity loss at the pixel level between two views of input images. Compared to the baseline method MoCo-v2, our method introduces negligible computation overhead (only <1% slower), but demonstrates consistently superior performance when transferring to downstream dense prediction tasks including object detection, semantic segmentation and instance segmentation; and outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin. Specifically, over the strong MoCo-v2 baseline, our method achieves significant improvements of 2.0% AP on PASCAL VOC object detection, 1.1% AP on COCO object detection, 0.9% AP on COCO instance segmentation, 3.0% mIoU on PASCAL VOC semantic segmentation and 1.8% mIoU on Cityscapes semantic segmentation. Code is available at: //git.io/AdelaiDet
In this paper, we focus on the self-supervised learning of visual correspondence using unlabeled videos in the wild. Our method simultaneously considers intra- and inter-video representation associations for reliable correspondence estimation. The intra-video learning transforms the image contents across frames within a single video via the frame pair-wise affinity. To obtain the discriminative representation for instance-level separation, we go beyond the intra-video analysis and construct the inter-video affinity to facilitate the contrastive transformation across different videos. By forcing the transformation consistency between intra- and inter-video levels, the fine-grained correspondence associations are well preserved and the instance-level feature discrimination is effectively reinforced. Our simple framework outperforms the recent self-supervised correspondence methods on a range of visual tasks including video object tracking (VOT), video object segmentation (VOS), pose keypoint tracking, etc. It is worth mentioning that our method also surpasses the fully-supervised affinity representation (e.g., ResNet) and performs competitively against the recent fully-supervised algorithms designed for the specific tasks (e.g., VOT and VOS).
Deep supervised learning has achieved great success in the last decade. However, its deficiencies of dependence on manual labels and vulnerability to attacks have driven people to explore a better solution. As an alternative, self-supervised learning attracts many researchers for its soaring performance on representation learning in the last several years. Self-supervised representation learning leverages input data itself as supervision and benefits almost all types of downstream tasks. In this survey, we take a look into new self-supervised learning methods for representation in computer vision, natural language processing, and graph learning. We comprehensively review the existing empirical methods and summarize them into three main categories according to their objectives: generative, contrastive, and generative-contrastive (adversarial). We further investigate related theoretical analysis work to provide deeper thoughts on how self-supervised learning works. Finally, we briefly discuss open problems and future directions for self-supervised learning. An outline slide for the survey is provided.
The key issue of few-shot learning is learning to generalize. In this paper, we propose a large margin principle to improve the generalization capacity of metric based methods for few-shot learning. To realize it, we develop a unified framework to learn a more discriminative metric space by augmenting the softmax classification loss function with a large margin distance loss function for training. Extensive experiments on two state-of-the-art few-shot learning models, graph neural networks and prototypical networks, show that our method can improve the performance of existing models substantially with very little computational overhead, demonstrating the effectiveness of the large margin principle and the potential of our method.